Essay Assignment

Purpose - This assignment will develop students' abilities to assess and use the scholarship on the working-class, and will particularly challenge them to explore key questions in labour history. To provide students with some direction in their research, the essay questions deal with subjects that are discussed at length in one of the articles in the course pack. Hence doing an intensive examination of the arguments of labour scholars is also a key part of the assignment.

Assignment - Write an essay that answers one of the questions below. Your essay should draw upon the relevant material in your course pack, plus THREE (3) other sources. Part of the evaluation will be the quality of the material you find, i.e. its relevance, whether it is sufficiently scholarly, etc. Your essay will also be judged on how effectively you build and argument by taking a position and supporting it with the material from your research. You may bring American examples and scholars into your essay, but your primary focus should be on Canada.

1. "The Knights of Labor were just a passing trend from a long time ago and made no meaningful impact." Do you agree with this statement? Explain why.

2. "Canada's economy may have enjoyed some boom years from 1896 to 1914, but not all workers got the benefits." Do you agree with this statement? Explain your position.

3. How important was gender in determining how workers survived the Great Depression?

4. Do you agree with Prof Don Wells's argument that the United Auto Workers in Canada in the 1940s saw an "evolution of a work-centred, ‘rank and file' model of unionism into a top-down model" of unionism? Explain why or why not.